by Nils Lindahl Elliot
On February 11, 2008, the news media reported that the actor Roy Scheider had died (1). Scheider was best known for his part as Chief Brody in Jaws (1975). It was Chief Brody that finally managed to dispatch the great white in Jaws, and then again, in Jaws 2 (1978).
Exactly one week after Scheider died, the news media reported that the scalloped hammerhead shark (Sphyrna lewini) had been added to the World Conservation Union’s (IUCN) ‘red list’ of endangered species (2). In fact, the Shark Specialist Group within the IUCN’s Species Survival Commission recommended the reclassification of this and of other species almost a year ago (3). The news appears to have received more widespread publicity in the context of this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and perhaps, in the context of Scheider’s death.
Of course, it would be a mistake to blame Jaws for the plight of Sphyrna lewini and the rest of the species whose stocks are declining. If anyone is responsible for the plight of sharks—especially for the free-falling numbers of pelagic shark species—it is the industrial long-line fisheries. The mentioned fisheries use lines that can be 100 kilometers long, and which may have thousands of baited hooks. Research published recently by the Western Pacific Fisheries Management Council suggests that sharks comprised more than 25% of the total catch of the Australian long-line tuna and billfish fishery, and that a similar proportion was caught by the Fiji long-line tuna fishery. Prior to a prohibition on the use of squid bait, sharks comprised 50% of the catch of the Hawaii-based long-line swordfish fishery. Following the mentioned prohibition, this proportion was reduced to a still scandalous 32% of the catch (4).
To my knowledge there are no Greenpeace or Sea Shepherd ships shadowing the fishing trawlers that are wreaking havoc on shark stocks. On the contrary, it seems that sharks are still feared and widely reviled. This raises the question: what it is about sharks that can generate this kind of feeling, or rather, the absence of the kind of empathy felt for, say, Humpback Whales? An easy first answer is that some shark species are capable of killing, and indeed do kill, humans. However, the statistics that I cited earlier suggest that, if anything, it is the human species that is killing sharks. To be sure, there are several other animals that are also capable of killing humans, but which are not the object of the kind of fear and loathing that has long been reserved for sharks. It thus seems fair to assume that attitudes towards sharks are not so much the result of the sharks’ natural capabilities, as they are of a modern cultural imagination — an imagination whose subjects are only too ready to label sharks as ‘man eaters’.
I assume that any such imagination is a modern one in the historical sense of the term, i.e. it has been in the making for hundreds of years. For this same reason, it will have been shaped by a complex ensemble of institutions, discourses and motivations. In this post I will nevertheless focus on just one very recent discourse: the representation of sharks in the nefarious, if highly entertaining genre of the blockbuster ‘animal attack’ film.
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Jaws is widely described as the first of the Hollywood summer blockbuster films. The key word in this expression is not so much blockbuster, as summer. Until 1975, Hollywood tended to regard the North American summer as the cinematic equivalent of an overfished, or rather an unfishable pelagic region where no number of lines and hooks could catch sizable numbers of spectators. The summer was a time to go out to the beach or into the countryside, not a time to pay to enter a darkened film theatre. With the benefit of hindsight, it does not seem like a coincidence that the film that reeled spectators into the cinemas was about the very activity that many tens of millions were about to engage early in the summer of 1975.
The problem was, of course, that in the absence of a summer film-going tradition, something had to be done to get people into the cinemas to watch such a film. Universal Pictures’ solution was to throw dollars—some 700,000 of them—at the mass media. At the time, this was an enormous sum to pay for advertisement. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the gamble paid rich dividends, if not exactly in the way that Universal might have been planned. Discussion of the film, and Jaw’s subsequent permeation, to not say saturation of so-called ‘non-traditional advertisement spaces’ meant that the film acquired a life that was no longer its own. In the weeks, months and then years that followed the film’s release, a proliferation of ‘meta-representations’ (representations about the representation) seemed to energize what was already a deep cultural fascination with ‘man eaters’, and with sharks in particular.
Amongst other things, this dynamic worked to ensure that the image of sharks became identified with the image(s) of Jaws. It is possible to get a sense of the extent of the transformation when it is noted that, before the film and Benchley’s novel hit the jackpot, there was no relation of identity between the word ‘jaws’ and the kind of toothy maw that is now indelibly associated with the film, the novel, and Carcharodon carcharias itself. As Spielberg put it in The Making of Jaws, ‘I just remember seeing a very large, you know…you know, a block of pages, that said ‘Jaws’ on it, and I didn’t know what that meant…Jaws… was it about a dentist? It was kind of an unusual word…I had no idea that this was about to become one of the best-selling books in the nation’. To be sure, Spielberg’s comment reminds one that, before the film became a ‘blockbuster’, Benchley’s novel became a best-seller. In as much as the novel, and indeed the script that Benchley penned for Universal Pictures were modified extensively to suit the conventions of Hollywood films, the success of the narrative was by no means purely a function of what some might describe as ‘the power of (film) images’.
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Jaws was followed not by one sequel but by three: Jaws 2 (1978), Jaws 3-D (1983), and Jaws: The Revenge (1987). It was also followed by a string of copycat films that gave a new lease on life to what I described earlier as the ‘animal attack’ film. The 1970s saw, amongst other films, Orca (1977), Piranha (1978), and The Swarm (1978). After something of a lull in the 1980s (Jaws 2, and Jaws: The Revenge, excepted), the genre re-emerged, with some modifications, in the form of films such as Arachnophobia (1990) and Anaconda (1997).
Film theorists, like experts in literary studies, have long noted that any genre classification is as good as the criteria used to arrive at the classification. My own criterion is that ‘animal attack’ films involve not just a ‘man eater’ (more on this below), but a tension between two categories: a factual or ‘real’ nature in the form of a species that does exist; but also a nature that exists in the form of a Natura horribilis, viz. a nature that does exist in the cultural imagination (5). This tension is what distinguishes the animal attack film from the monster films with which it is frequently conflated. But it is also what arguably makes animal attack films even more monstrous than monster films. While some monster films may have a certain verisimilitude within the bounds of their own narrative context, there is never really any doubt, unless one is a youngish child, that the monster is a matter of fiction. By contrast, a key part of the meaning, to not say effectiveness of many if not all animal attack films is that the animal, if not its actions, is ‘really real’. The boundary between the real animal and the unreal animal is thus likely to be blurred.
At least in the 1970s films, this dynamic was underscored by the fact that the animals made a sudden and devastating appearance in the context of an entirely plausible everyday life—or as I began to note earlier, an every(holi)day break. The filmmakers of Jaws worked particularly hard to produce an almost ethnographic sense of a carefree sun, sand, and surf resort. This aspect of Jaws and of several of the other films, as underscored by the all too real refusal of some of the protagonists to head warnings of impending doom, made the suspense of the films even more effective. In Jaws, for example, Chief Brody pleaded with the town’s mayor to close the beaches of Amity. However, his request was refused on the grounds that tourism, or rather the business of tourism, was more important. The film was, in this sense, both a very accurate portrayal of the kind of society that America had become, and an inversion of the true order of another dimension of environmental risk: in the case of sharks and many other species, it was not so much that business led to the death of people by ‘man eaters’, but rather, that it led to the death of sharks by ‘eating men’. As I have noted in Mediating Nature, the very expression ‘man eater’ is not just a gendered one, but a very paradoxically gendered one.
If the films frequently involved the upheaval of everyday life, they also worked to ‘personalize’ this upheaval by recourse to that standard Hollywood convention, the focalization on a handful of likable, or at least ‘identifiable’ protagonists. Put differently, while suspense required that Natura horribilis should appear to kill randomly, the plot focused—‘focalized’—not on nameless, ‘faceless’ individuals, but on characters whose lives or personalities tended to be described in ways that encouraged audiences to identify with them. This convention worked at once to enable, and to consolidate a dynamic that Edgar Morin has described as ‘identification-projection’. Referring to the work of Jean Epstein, Morin has suggested that a film is that moment in which two psyches come together: the spectator’s, and the one incorporated by the film. ‘The screen is that place where actor thought and spectator thought find each other and acquire the materiality of (being) an act’(6).
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Summing up, we can say that the ‘blockbustering’ of a certain species; the subsequent proliferation of narrativized references across a number of apparently unrelated contexts; but also the features of the narrative that I have just described, may have worked at once to rekindle, and to promote a new fascination with sharks. In some cases, the fascination may have been displaced by fear, revulsion, or even a cultural hatred that was expressed in undersea bloodsports. Decades after the first Jaws was released, this is ostensibly part of what persuaded Peter Benchley to become a spokesman for the National Council of Environmental Defence. In 2000, Benchley suggested that ‘In the 25 years since “Jaws” was first released, sharks have experienced an unprecedented and uncontrolled attack’. If he were to write the novel again, the sharks would be the victims and not the villains. Benchley nonetheless noted that he had no qualms about the original novel, which he suggested was a reflection of the existing state of knowledge vis-à-vis sharks (7).
Whether this is a bit of convenient historical revisionism or not, it is tempting to assume that the proverbial corner has been turned in the context of mass mediated representations of sharks. In fact, a strong case can be made that the picture remains a rather more complex one. On the one hand, what I described in the last two posts as the ‘nature media’ continue to represent sharks in problematic ways. Even as the documentaries insist via their voice-over narrations that white sharks have been unfairly stereotyped as killing machines, the documentaries’ visual images do little or nothing to contradict this very message. On the other hand, the sub-genres of the shark attack film, and the shark attack scene continue to have a real bite with producers and audiences alike. We have only to consider the success of films like Deep Blue Sea (1999) or Open Water (2003), or indeed of the shark scenes in The Beach (2000) or Into the Blue (2005) to realise that even as sharks are being destroyed by the long-lines of industrial fisheries, they continue to act as the commercial hooks of many a Hollywood film.
References
(1) ‘Jaws star Roy Scheider dies at 75’ in BBC News online, February 11, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7238211.stm, accessed February 25, 2008.
(2) ‘Hammerhead in need of protection’ in BBC News online, February 18, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7251651.stm, accessed February 25, 2008.
(3) See their website at http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/organizations/ssg/ssg.htm. Accessed February 25, 2008.
(4) Gilman, E.; Clarke,S.; Brothers, N.; Alfaro-Shigueto, J.; Mandelman, J.; Mangel, J.; Petersen, S.; Piovano, S.: Thomson, N.; Dalzell, P.; Donoso, M., Goren, M.; and Werner, T. (2007) Shark Depredation and Unwanted Bycatch in Pelagic Longline Fisheries: Industry Practices and Attitudes and Shark Avoidance Strategies. Hawaii: Western Pacific Fisheries Management Council.
(5) Lindahl Elliot, N. (2006) Mediating Nature. London: Routledge International Library of Sociology.
(6) Epstein quoted by Morin, E. (1956) Le Cinéma ou l’Homme Imaginaire. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Translation my own.
(7) ‘ “Jaws” author says sharks victims, not villains’ in CNN online, at http://archives.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/07/19/jaws.image.reut/, accessed February 25, 2008.
Copyright © 2008 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved
